Rice, Laban Lacy, 1870-1973 (MSS 605)

Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® MSS Finding Aids Manuscripts 4-17-2017 Rice, Laban Lacy, 1870-1973 (MSS 605) Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Western Kentucky University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid Part of the American Literature Commons, Astrophysics and Astronomy Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Folklife Archives, Manuscripts &, "Rice, Laban Lacy, 1870-1973 (MSS 605)" (2017). MSS Finding Aids. Paper 4290. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/4290 This Finding Aid is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in MSS Finding Aids by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Department of Library Special Collections Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY 42101-1092 Descriptive Inventory MSS 605 RICE, Laban Lacy, 1870-1973 8 boxes. 111 folders. 2,160 items. 1887-1988. Originals, photocopies, photographs. SC2017.28.1; 1982.118.1 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Laban Lacy Rice, son of Laban Marchbanks Rice and Martha Lacy and brother of the poet Cale Young Rice, was born in Dixon, Kentucky, on 14 October 1870. In 1879, his family moved to Evansville, Indiana, where his father dealt in tobacco. Rice received his A.B. in 1891, his M.A. in 1892, and his Ph.D. in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in 1894, all from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee. At Cumberland, he and brother Cale were star baseball players (pitcher and catcher, respectively) and Rice co-founded the Theta chapter of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Rice taught at Auburn Seminary in Auburn, Kentucky, then served as professor of English Language and Literature at Cumberland from 1894-1904 (with the exception of 1897-1899, when he was associate editor of The Cumberland Presbyterian in Nashville, Tennessee). In 1902, he founded The Cumberland Presbyterian Quarterly, a review of theology, philosophy and literature, and served as its editor until 1904. In 1902, Rice helped to establish Castle Heights School in Lebanon, Tennessee. He served as its headmaster from 1904 until 1913, when he became sole owner and president of the school. In 1916, a plan to affiliate Castle Heights with Cumberland University and to combine the schools under a single management, with Rice as president, was abandoned. Rice converted Castle Heights into a military academy in 1917, earning for himself the honorific “Colonel,” then sold the school in 1921. From 1920-1929 he was president of the Junior Military Academy at Bloomington Springs, Tennessee. From 1919-1922, he was owner and director of Camp Kawasawa for Boys on the Cumberland River near Lebanon, and from 1920-1947 he owned and operated Nakánawa Junior and Senior Camps for Girls on the eastern and western shores of Mayland Lake near Crossville, Tennessee. He was also part owner and associate director of Camp Sequoyah for Boys at Asheville, North Carolina from 1929-1936. In May 1939, Rice was named associate president and chancellor of Cumberland University, where he directed an endowment drive for its law school. He resigned his office in June 1940, apparently due to conflicts over authority with President Ernest L. Stockton. In November 1941, however, Stockton resigned and Rice was appointed president. Upon retiring from the presidency in June 1946, Rice, an accomplished amateur astronomer, donated a building and equipment to establish the Rice Observatory at Cumberland. Over the years, he also donated artwork to various institutions and gave items from his extensive collection of MSS 605 Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, Library Special Collections, Western Kentucky University 2 books and manuscripts to several libraries, including Cumberland and Western Kentucky University. After his retirement, Rice vigorously pursued his interests in travel, writing and study. He lectured extensively and wrote books and articles on relativity, astronomy, cosmology, and the possibility of life on other planets. He made homes in Ware Neck, Virginia, where he constructed his own observatory, and in St. Petersburg and Orlando, Florida. He established the Rice Planetarium in St. Petersburg in October 1953 and operated it until June 1954; after an abortive attempt to reestablish it at Rollins College in Winter Park, he relocated it to Stetson University in Deland, Florida in 1956. He also presented a telescope to Orlando’s Central Florida Museum in 1957. Rice read widely, wrote poetry, fiction and memoirs, and was an energetic letter-writer to the editors of newspapers, popular magazines and scholarly journals. Politically, he was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War (although he sympathized with Representative Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war views in a 1968 letter to him), a foe of Communism and campus radicalism, and a critic of judicial decisions on school desegregation in the 1950s. Two of the more sensational incidents of his life occurred in 1953, when he shot a would-be suitor attempting to abduct his daughter Katherine from her home, accidentally wounding her in the process; and in 1961, when he used his expertise in classical literature and history to perpetrate a widely reported hoax in which a fictional archaeologist claimed to have discovered the tomb of King Orestes at Mycenae in Greece. As he grew older, Rice received regular invitations and recognition from Castle Heights and from Cumberland University as a popular speaker, benefactor, former president and its oldest living graduate. Cumberland created the Rice Medal in Astronomy in 1957, and its law school awarded Rice a Doctor of Letters degree in 1959. On his 98th birthday in 1968, he spoke to students for more than an hour, and spoke for 90 minutes on his one-hundredth birthday in 1970, when he was fêted at Cumberland with celebrations that included “Laban Lacy Rice Day” in Lebanon. In 1971, Castle Heights honored him with one of its inaugural “Lux et Veritas” Awards for outstanding contributions to education. Rice died on 14 February 1973 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and was buried there at Cedar Grove Cemetery. He was predeceased by his wife Blanche Alexander Buchanan (1871-1937), who he married on 23 November 1892. They were the parents of two daughters, Katherine (Rice) Shaw and Anne Hays (Rice) O’Neil. COLLECTION NOTE This collection consists of correspondence, writings (fiction, non-fiction, autobiographical, scientific), poems, clippings, genealogy, and miscellaneous papers of Laban Lacy Rice. His scientific writing is principally on astronomy, cosmology and relativity. Also included are correspondence and papers relating to Rice’s brother, poet and dramatist Cale Young Rice, and his sister-in-law, author Alice Hegan Rice. Box 1 contains clippings (Folders 2-6), chiefly from local newspapers, chronicling Rice’s life and career. Included are lecture announcements, reviews of his books, news of his gifts of books and astronomical equipment, and retrospectives published when he reached his 100th year and beyond. Materials relating to the 1974 dedication of a historical marker at the Dixon, MSS 605 Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, Library Special Collections, Western Kentucky University 3 Kentucky home of Rice and his brother Cale (Folder 7) include clippings and the ceremony program. The remainder of Box 1 (Folders 8-15) and Boxes 2 and 3 contain Rice’s general correspondence. Much of the correspondence relates to his literary and scientific pursuits and is frequently with persons distinguished in their fields. Included are authors’ acknowledgements of notices in the Cumberland Presbyterian; letters of thanks from recipients of Rice’s books; exchanges with scientists and other scholars about their work and ideas; responses to Rice’s submission of manuscripts for publication and to his solicitation of endowments for Cumberland University; greetings, invitations and reminiscences from alumni and administrators of Cumberland and Castle Heights; letters of appreciation from patrons of Nakánawa Camps for Girls, especially after Rice’s 1947 announcement that he would sell the camp, and in observance of his 102nd birthday in 1972; correspondence regarding lecture arrangements, the relocation of his Florida planetarium, his telescope gift to the Central Florida Museum, and other gifts; his letters to politicians commenting on national issues; letters (genuine and fabricated) relating to his “Mycenae hoax”; and cards and letters of tribute on his 100th and subsequent birthdays. Of interest is a copy (the original is at Cumberland University) of a letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower (Box 2, Folder 10) responding to Rice’s request for comment on Confederate tactics at the Battle of Gettysburg. Also included throughout the correspondence are letters to newspapers and journals such as Time, Life, Harper’s, The American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic and the Saturday Review in which Rice responds to articles on literary, religious, historical, scientific and political subjects or points out errors in English usage. A separate folder (Box 6, Folder 4) contains Rice’s editorializing on race. In letters to the editor and opinion pieces, he reacts to articles on civil rights activism and race relations and criticizes 1950s U.S. Supreme Court decisions on school desegregation. Box 3 also includes separate folders of Rice’s correspondence with Albert Einstein (Folder 9) about his theory of relativity and other ideas, as well as correspondence detailing Rice’s gifts of books, manuscripts and artifacts made over a period of years to Western Kentucky University (Folders 10, 11). The correspondence with WKU relates to Rice’s gifts of his own papers and to those of his brother and sister-in-law, Cale Young Rice and Alice Hegan Rice (see MSS 47 RICE Collection). Box 4 contains correspondence, photographs and other papers relating to Rice’s brother and sister-in-law, Cale Young Rice and Alice Hegan Rice. Cale’s letters to Rice (Folder 1) concern family matters, his and Alice’s literary work and health, and their travel to New York, London, Paris and Maine.

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